The Last Voyage of the Demeter Review
Theatrical Movie Review - Horror
A couple years ago, my kids got me to subscribe to Daily Dracula, a Substack newsletter that emails you chapters of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” as they happen in real time (between May 3 and November 7). It’s a clever way to invite someone to read a classic novel that isn’t always taught in high school English classes. However, because it is told in chronological order, the chapter on the Demeter is broken up in a way that it is not in the book. So I was interested to see how it would look all put together in André Øvredal’s “The Last Voyage of the Demeter.”
Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham) is looking to round out his crew taking a large shipment of crates from Romania to London. His first mate Wojchek (David Dastmalchian) brings on Clemens (Corey Hawkins) as a crewman and a doctor. When a young woman named Anna (Aisling Fansciosi) is found half-dead, Clemens gives her blood transfusions. As she grows stronger and strange things begin to happen to the livestock and even other crew members, she speaks of a dark entity that is aboard the ship.
This movie was a bit of a mixed bag for me. There were parts of it that were really effective and other elements that just didn’t work.
The biggest downfall for me was the pacing. The movie is nearly 2 hours long, and it felt like it was 2 hours long. Because of the nature of the story, I don’t know if there is much that could be done to improve the pacing that much. It gets to action fast enough, the problem is just that the action is just a repeating scene. The nighttime maulings are the same and the daytime repercussions are the same. So watching the same scene play out three times in a row just starts to feel a bit tedious, particularly when it’s just a jump scare without a lot of the dread you hope for.
That said, all of the performances are well done. I thought everyone played their roles really well. The standout for me was the Captain’s nephew Toby, played by Woody Norman. He did a great job as a young actor, holding his own with some excellent adult performers.
As I mentioned above, the story is fairly straightforward, but repetitive. I think if the reveal of Dracula had been a bit more guarded, it might have worked better, given that the source material has it fairly guarded, since it’s a first hand account. But once the monster is revealed, it kind of loses steam.
Overall, this is a decent adaptation of a single chapter of a classic novel from over a century ago. But it is just a single chapter, and that’s not a lot to go on. If you want an introduction to “Dracula,” maybe set a reminder to subscribe to Daily Dracula next May instead.
This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on August 13, 2023.